Enterprises typically extend online customer support to their customers to enable the customers to seek answers to their queries, to address their concerns, to make payments and the like.
A typical online customer support facility may include human and/or machine based resources capable of interacting with the customers to provide desired assistance to the customers. In an example scenario, an interactive chat or a similar communication interface may be provisioned to a customer to enable the customer to engage in an interaction with a human agent or a virtual agent of the enterprise.
In some example scenarios, the online customer support facility may provision web forms to the customers or enable open-ended chat interactions of the customers with human and/or virtual agents to assist the customers with their respective needs.
Filling in web forms is typically a unidirectional experience. A customer provides information as requested in the form and usually only receives back a confirmation message or an error message upon submission of the form. The customer has to interpret the confirmation/error message for determining the next course of action, which may be inconvenient for the customer.
Traditional chat interfaces offer the convenience and familiarity of the chat interaction style, but the input for the end user is of open-ended nature. In other words, the input area in current chat interfaces is a form field, which accepts any kind of free-form input. This presents a challenge for both systems and agents attempting to solicit particular types of inputs from the customers. In some example scenarios, a system at the online customer support facility may process the information (for example, an account number of the customer) and determine that the input is not in conformity with the format understood by the system and provide an error message to the customer. The customer is required to decipher the error message and provide the information again in the desired format.
The conventional mechanisms of filling up information in a web form or interacting with a help system in an open-ended chat are therefore limited in their ability to provision seamless and hassle-free assistance to the customer.
Accordingly, there is a need to provide assistance to the customer in an efficient and seamless manner. Moreover, there is a need to acquire structured inputs in turn-based interactions, such as chat interactions, so as to facilitate swift and correct interpretation of customer inputs and thereby effect provisioning of assistance desired by the customer in an efficient manner.